The Slammin' Salmon

I like Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe that broke out with 2001’s SUPER TROOPERS and went on to make CLUB DREAD and BEERFEST. SUPER TROOPERS is one of those movies I enjoy springing on people, CLUB DREAD gets funnier with each viewing, and, BEERFEST, um, featured beer. Broken Lizard’s members play well off one another, they know how to set up a joke, and their rapid fire style keeps us laughing even as it forces us to pay attention.

THE SLAMMIN’ SALMON takes place in an eponymous upscale Miami restaurant. The manager, needing a big night on the sales floor, announces a contest with fabulous prizes for the highest-earning server. Which is fine, but really only serves to create a story arc on which to hang a series of gags. For this is very much a gag movie, with philosophy seems of, “Didn’t like that one? Here’s another. And another.” Which is great for me, because I liked the gags. THE SLAMMIN’ SALMON kept me laughing out loud from beginning to end, generating enough goodwill to erase the skunky memory of BEERFEST and fire me up for the troupe’s next film. These guys are fantastic.

The Men Who Stare at Goats

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS is silly and I chuckled all the way through it. 

Here’s the premise: Ewan McGregor is an Ann Arbor newspaper reporter whose life is going nowhere.  He’s stuck interviewing crackpots like some guy who claims to have been part of a secret Army psychic warrior corps.  His wife left him.  He needs a change.

History gives him one when America invades Iraq.  Eager for a story, any story, MacGregor flies to Kuwait where … he … goes … nowhere.  Then he meets George Clooney, who professes to be a member of the same psychic warrior corps Crackpot McCrazy talked about back home.  Clooney’s on a mission into Iraq, and MacGregor comes with him.  Oh, yeah, there’s a problem: Clooney gives every indication of being nuts.

And we’re off.  THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS spends the next hour and a half going from MacGregor’s adventures in the present day to recounting the history of the New Earth Army, a supersecret band of psychic warriors who call themselves Jedi Warriors and follow their leader, Jeff Bridges in full hippie mode, to the edges of perception, ability, and credulity.  But could the New Earth Army still be around, working in Iraq?  Does MacGregor have what it takes to become a Jedi Warrior?  And what’s the point in sitting around and staring at goats, anyway?

OK, so I’ve just spent three paragraphs recapping the picture, which makes for a super-lazy review.  Shut it.  This stuff is free.

Anyway, THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS works because it embraces the silliness of its premise while playing it absolutely straight.  Clooney really believes he has amazing psychic powers.  Bridges creates the most earnest hippie colonel in the history of the United States Army.  And MacGregor, well, if anyone deserves to become a Jedi Warrior, it’s this guy.  Have fun.

I Sell The Dead

Now this is what I’m talkin’ about.

I SELL THE DEAD, made on a shoestring and using Staten Island as a stand-in for 18^th-Century England, loves gothic horror, loves comedy, and loves movies.  Starring Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden as grave robbers who specialize in the exotic, this movie offers wall-to-wall monsters, jokes, atmosphere and goodwill.  Add supporting work from genre favorites Angus Scrimm and Ron Perlman, and you have everything you could want in a horror comedy.

I SELL THE DEAD features vampires, zombies, villains wearing bowlers, knife-throwers, and at least one beheading.  Oh, and it also features joke after joke after joke, creating a sense of general delight and carrying it all the way through the film’s running time.

So if gothic horror-comedy is your idea of a good time (it’s certainly mine), see I SELL THE DEAD.  It’s a great time at the movies.

Iron Man 2

IRON MAN 2 is a great, great movie.  That is, if you love reading Popular Mechanics.  Because if there’s one thing IRON MAN 2 delights in showing us, it’s long sequences of guys welding.  And dragging cables.  And doing, y’know, Metal Shop stuff.

Me, I don’t read Popular Mechanics.  I never took Metal Shop.  Long stretches of IRON MAN 2 bored me out of my mind. 

That’s not to say that Robert Downey, Jr. isn’t fantastic in what will become his signature role.  Or that Scarlett Johansson (as a superduperspy) doesn’t look great in a catsuit.  It doesn’t even mean that stuff doesn’t blow up real good.  It just means that I didn’t care.

I didn’t care about Iron Man’s big fight with his best friend (a role demanding far less gravitas than The Great Don Cheadle brought to bear).  I didn’t care about the Big Villain’s boring revenge story.  And I certainly didn’t care about the intricacies of corporate reorganization.

By the time the Big Villain, who wasn’t nearly as interesting as the Little Villain, unleashed his evil plan, I’d grown so worn out with pseudo-physics, quasi-engineering bull$#!^ that I could only marvel that this film failed to learn the basic lesson of the Star Wars prequels.  To wit, fighting robots are dull.  Their destruction carries no emotional heft, because they’re things.  You might as well have given me twenty minutes of Iron Man unplugging refrigerators.

For all that, however, IRON MAN 2 does offer something to make it worth seeing.  It’s not on the posters and it’s not in the ads, however: it’s a secret weapon named Sam Rockwell, upon whom I now formally grant Can Do No Wrong status.  Rockwell plays the Little Villain, the CEO of Stark Corporation’s primary competitor in the weapons business.  His name is Justin Hammer, and he’s a weasely, sniveling wannabe Tony Stark who absolutely steals every second he’s on screen.  Let me say that again:  Sam Rockwell (CDNW) steals the screen from Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, and The Great Don Cheadle.  I didn’t think anyone could upstage any of these actors; but Rockwell’s Justin Hammer is so deliciously slimy, so wily yet such a doofus, that he runs away with this movie.  After GALAXY QUEST, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, CHOKE, MOON, and now IRON MAN 2, I can safely assert that Sam Rockwell has arrived.  This actor, truly, can do no wrong.

So, yeah, IRON MAN 2 has a whole lot working against it.  But its bright spot is very, very bright.  If they make another film in this series, I hope they call it JUSTIN HAMMER.